Casually I started feeling affection for you
At one point, you became family
But as I kept on staring at you, I started to get sick of you
The conscience of my heart kept pricking me
*So I let you go
Because I didn’t think I loved you that much
I sent you away, I..
**If you try leave, I’ll hold on to you
But if you come back, I’ll feel burdened
This is how men are, I’m a bad man
Don’t trust such a cowardly man
You’re too good to give to someone else
But you’re not someone I want to keep
I don’t want to marry you, but I do want to date you
This is how men are, I’m a bad man
Don’t trust such a cowardly man
I really love you, but I always make you sad
I really am a bad man
Don’t forgive me
*
**
I don’t know me, but I can’t stop
I don’t know me, but I can’t stop
I don’t know me, but I can’t stop
I don’t know me, but you know
Don’t come any closer, I’ll just feel more apologetic
Leave me alone now, don’t love a guy like me
“No matter how dramatic a person’s direct experience is, it is always exceeded by the experience of an instrument.”
-Joseph Brodsky, A Poet and Prose
In muscles tensed; in strings left quivering; in brush-strokes sketched with regret; in lens-clicks quicker than a skipped heartbeat; in the blood-letting of pen upon paper: Poetry and Prose—tragic beauty, so elusive to reality, is finally, finally, found.
Unaware yet eager, born believing art imitates life (of all things!), you, I, we lived such crude and clumsy outlines of artistic lyricism, lives drawn with the unused hand–disconnected from the cerebral, brain-dead. And on rare days, illuminated, pass the shadows of Muses. And? And we—we looked away.
Choose to look—within the awkward glance, within the painful memory, within the unconscious speech and conscious action, I delve within. Performing, privately, the craftsman consumed by craft.
Art, look how alive you are, breathing newborn vapors vivid and inspired. And reality, you, once pregnant with promise, what are these trite remains of dreams stillborn? I stand, holding our miscarriages in tired arms; there is no room to embrace another.
Jealousy, despair, acceptance.
In living, let us do away with such things. I, at least, must do away with such things.
To be born believing art imitates life, and to die believing life can imitate art. This is optimism.
“…and from thence he went into Italy, where he found such stately Danes and lovely Ladies, whom nature had adorned with all perfection of outward beauty, whose sight put him again in rememberance of his fair Love, which, like fresh fuel newly augmented to the flame of his burning desire, O (said he) how unhappy am I to be haunted by these heart tormenting fiends, bewitching the eyes of simple men with Angel-like faces, and, like enchanting Circes, bringing them to a labyrinth of continual woes.”
For a long time I’ve been thinking of how I should put this
There’s a puzzle in my heart
Although we’ve been busily exchanging our feelings
Why can’t I say that I really understand you?
Because of your smile, I am happy
Because of your silence, I am devastated
All of my thoughts, I confide in you
Yet still, in your eyes, I see all that you’ve withheld
Even if fate would have us meet, only for us to choose to remain guarded
Even if our worlds have their differences
I wish to give you my everything
Why do you still silence the words in your heart?
Now tell me, what else it is that you want?
Now tell me, what else can I do for you?
If two people who wish to love each other lack trust…
Why bother?
Now tell me, what else it is that you want?
Now tell me, what else can I do for you?
If two people who wish to love each other lack trust…
Why should we bother?
If two people who wish to love each other lack trust
Love loses all its color
Tyranny of the majority notwithstanding–since when was the majority a sign of good taste? In anything? And in satire–devouring babies anyone?
Anyway, here’s the cover:
The following is lil’ old me’s letter of support to the New Yorker:
I find it the height of ironic, hypocritical lunacy that America still perks its ears at the mention of the First Amendment, and, frothing at the mouth, fancies itself as the international rottweiler protecting freedoms of thought and speech. That notion is, quite simply, rabid. “Freedom” and “Values” are buzzwords since replaced with the ethos of 21st century America: Political Correctness.
Political Correctness is a cultural opiate so efficacious in its intellectual deprivation it stifles not only the fruit of thought–intelligent and reasoned debate–but the very seed if it–wit and humor.
Iron Curtains and Great Walls of heavy-handed government censorship will in time be broken by the hammer of reform and chisel of sedition; far more dangerous is the choking mist with which we enshroud ourselves, supported, in final ironic hallucination, by a savior mouthing “Change” and “Hope”.
A visionary American once had a dream, more or less, that our national consciousness would shed its racial prejudice. We seem to have achieved it through circuitous means–rather than confronting our fears, we have learned not to voice them. I modestly suggest another dream, one I hope Americans will recognize as their own. A new dream of a nation, when confronted with its own fears in satire, able to laugh–and a candidate who, through intelligence aided by humor, conquers these fears and brings true Hope of Change.
What makes it more pathetic/funny/American is the fact that most of the “outraged” are ACLU backing, Olympics boycotting, Free press (except in America) Liberals.
They can all, quite figuratively of course, fellate me.
